Jessamyn West (librarian)

Jessamyn West
Jessamyn West: The Librarian at Home
Born	(1968-09-05) September 5, 1968 (age 48)
Residence	Vermont
Nationality	American
Occupation	Librarian, blogger
Known for	librarian.net
Website	jessamyn.info
Jessamyn West's voice recorded 14 sep 2014

Jessamyn Charity West (born September 5, 1968) is an American librarian and blogger, best known as the creator of librarian.net and for her unconventional views on her profession. She is a former member of the American Library Association Council, and was a moderator on MetaFilter.

West grew up in Massachusetts, where her father, computer engineer Tom West, worked for RCA and Data General. (He was the key figure in the 1981 Tracy Kidder book The Soul of a New Machine.) She may be named after the author Jessamyn West (according to her parents, a "coincidence"), and as a child corresponded with her. She is also the niece of actor Peter Coyote.

She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst and moved to Seattle in 1990. In 1995, she went to Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where she ran a library for the Freedom Forum. After returning to the U.S. she completed graduate work at the University of Washington for a Master of Librarianship degree.

She has lived in Vermont since 2003. She works as a freelance library consultant, mainly in Orange County, Vermont, focusing on helping libraries with technology. She was a paid employee and moderator for the group blog MetaFilter, and answers as many as two questions a day on the question-and-answer subforum Ask MetaFilter. She is also an active , working particularly on Vermont and library topics. In June 2011 she joined the Advisory Board. She has staffed information desks at Burning Man and the 1999 WTO protests, and served as a judge for ThinkQuest.